Ironhold

Screwed up the one and only good relationship I've ever had because I was dealing with an undiagnosed mental health condition and it was affecting my judgement. 
Am now staring down 40 with zero prospects and no means to support anyone anyway due to how little I make at the local-level newspapers I'm with. 
All I can do is trust that whatever will happen will happen. 

I am a professional entertainment writer. 
I also have an MBA and have, for all intents and purposes, been trained in psychological warfare. 
That being said - 
While the film made a pretense of being an investigation into the phenomenon of near-death experiences, the structure of the film and the way various elements are arranged violate the basic tenets of how a documentary film should be. In particular, the way everything is set up nudges the viewer towards a generalized Protestant understanding of the afterlife, such that one can argue the film is in a way propaganda. 
 
However...
One of the people who they interviewed did describe an experience in a place he referred to as "outer darkness", so make of that what you will...

I think you and your parents need to both take it down a notch. 
Your dad is out of line for saying things like you won't have your muscles in Heaven. 
You need to ask yourself *why* you're spending so much time at the gym and what you hope to accomplish through it. 
As it is, you don't need to be wearing a name tag to serve as a missionary. Your membership in the church is enough that you should be a living example to others as much as you can be, and you should also be well-versed enough in the scriptures, the church's teachings, and the church's history to answer any questions that people may have. 
 
And for the record, my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in my senior year of high school. It would have been a hardship for me to leave my parents at that point, and so I made the internet my mission field. 

I am a professional entertainment writer. 
I also have an MBA and have, for all intents and purposes, been trained in psychological warfare. 
That being said - 
While the film made a pretense of being an investigation into the phenomenon of near-death experiences, the structure of the film and the way various elements are arranged violate the basic tenets of how a documentary film should be. In particular, the way everything is set up nudges the viewer towards a generalized Protestant understanding of the afterlife, such that one can argue the film is in a way propaganda. 
 
However...
One of the people who they interviewed did describe an experience in a place he referred to as "outer darkness", so make of that what you will...

I live in Coryell County, which is by Fort Hood / Fort Cavazos in what is known as the "Heart" of Texas. 
There's not a single publicly-accessible charging station in the entire county. 
The nearest station I'm aware of is at a car dealership in Temple, in neighboring Bell County. 
A grocery store chain is in talks to come to Killeen, which is just on the other side of Hood from us, and they'll have charging stations in their parking lot. But no immediate plans for anything closer at this time.

If you'll recall, one of the three people who Kyle Rittenhouse shot was pretending to surrender in the hopes that Rittenhouse would let his guard down. When it looked like this was happening, the person went for a weapon. Rittenhouse then very nearly blew their arm off. 
Under international law, "pretending to surrender" is illegal. It can encourage attackers to assume all people attempting to surrender are running a gambit and so refuse to take prisoners. 

The problem with electric vehicles is that once you get outside of the densely-packed major metropolitan areas it's hard to find publicly-accessible charging stations. 
Go out far enough, and the only way an EV is traveling from A to B is on the back of a truck. 

There is a limit to the upper and lower levels that most people can hear. 
A lot of animals, however, can hear at levels that exceed what most humans are able to do. For example, your hypothetical dog whistle is meant to sound at a pitch that is beyond what the average human can hear but within what most dogs can hear. 
My high-end and low-end are past what is normal for humans and into at least the lower portion of what many animals can hear. 
Yes, I can literally hear dog whistles, as can a few other people I know.

So this weekend's episode of "Sammy Hagar's Top Rock Countdown" is him playing spooky songs from various artists because it's Halloween next week. 
He was rolling through such classics as "Werewolves of London" and "Welcome To My Nightmare", but I had to change the channel for a few minutes when a certain infamous Rolling Stones number came on. I've had enough go wrong today, and don't want to invite anything else to happen. 

So this weekend's episode of "Sammy Hagar's Top Rock Countdown" is him playing spooky songs from various artists because it's Halloween next week. 
He was rolling through such classics as "Werewolves of London" and "Welcome To My Nightmare", but I had to change the channel for a few minutes when a certain infamous Rolling Stones number came on. I've had enough go wrong today, and don't want to invite anything else to happen. 

I think it's a glitch of some kind. I hit "submit reply", got up to go get something from the kitchen, and saw that my post hadn't gone up. Thinking I might not have actually pressed the button (not a single mouse I've plugged into this new computer has worked quite right for some reason) I pressed it again. When *that* didn't seem to post I refreshed the page and found that both attempts had in fact posted but the page had failed to refresh accordingly. 

In addition to being high-functioning autistic, my high-end and low-end hearing are both better than normal, to the point that I'm into the range of hearing generally associated with canines. It's true that my mid-range has been damaged by loud noises over my lifetime, but my high-end and low-end are so sharp that once upon a time I could tell when one of my flip phones was done charging because the electrical current passing through would make a different noise the second the battery hit 100%. 
Total silence can leave me scrambling to figure out if I actually heard something or not, and if so just what I heard. 
This is one of the many reasons why I made it a point to sync my iPhone to my iTunes account and download some radio apps, as being able to listen to music keeps me from hyper-fixating on what I might or might not have heard while also giving me a bit of a mental boost. 

In addition to being high-functioning autistic, my high-end and low-end hearing are both better than normal, to the point that I'm into the range of hearing generally associated with canines. It's true that my mid-range has been damaged by loud noises over my lifetime, but my high-end and low-end are so sharp that once upon a time I could tell when one of my flip phones was done charging because the electrical current passing through would make a different noise the second the battery hit 100%. 
Total silence can leave me scrambling to figure out if I actually heard something or not, and if so just what I heard. 
This is one of the many reasons why I made it a point to sync my iPhone to my iTunes account and download some radio apps, as being able to listen to music keeps me from hyper-fixating on what I might or might not have heard while also giving me a bit of a mental boost. 

There is a limit to the upper and lower levels that most people can hear. 
A lot of animals, however, can hear at levels that exceed what most humans are able to do. For example, your hypothetical dog whistle is meant to sound at a pitch that is beyond what the average human can hear but within what most dogs can hear. 
My high-end and low-end are past what is normal for humans and into at least the lower portion of what many animals can hear. 
Yes, I can literally hear dog whistles, as can a few other people I know.

To keep from clogging the forum - 
At the end of the month we're going to have a movie adaptation of the "Five Nights At Freddy's" multimedia horror franchise. 
The bulk of the story takes place in and around the city of Hurricane, Utah, so expect people to possibly be asking questions about Utah and maybe the church depending upon what the movie brings up. 
 
(nutshell: a mad scientist got a job as a security guard at a Chuck E. Cheese - type pizzeria so that he had a ready supply of test subjects, and his victims have possessed the animatronics in the hope of having their revenge... but since they only know him as a guard at the building, they're attacking anyone in a guard's uniform.)

During the Reconstruction era, missionaries operating in the American South were often targeted by the KKK and other hate groups. 
The story goes that one night J. Golden Kimball, who would later be a senior leader in the church, was meeting with a group of fellow missionaries out in the woods because it wasn't safe for them to assemble together in any of the local towns. Somehow, the KKK found out, parked themselves on the opposite bank of a river, and made a big spectacle of setting up a boiling pot of pitch. 
In response, Kimball bluffed the KKK members, claiming that we all had horns that came out in the moonlight. Anyone who tried it would be gored to death. 
Not only did the KKK members believe him, nearly 200 years later there are people who *still* believe him as well. 

The industry was still going pretty strong in the late 2000s and early 2010s, such that Martha Beck's book was pushed by Oprah until involved parties starting pushing back on her claims to the point that an op/ed in "Writer's Digest" referenced it when discussing then-recent literary hoaxes. 
If anything, the 2000s was a transitory period where members of the church were turning the tables. As more and more members took to the internet and found resources like FARMS and SHIELDS to supplement their own studies, they found themselves confronting more and more critics of the church in public forums where dozens or even hundreds of people were watching. Ministers and ministries alike, religious and secular, were made to look foolish as their outdated arguments and pure hatred were exposed. 
There is still hatred against the church, and various mainstream outlets are involved in perpetuating it. But the situation is unsustainable, not in this day and age of options for content.  

During the Reconstruction era, missionaries operating in the American South were often targeted by the KKK and other hate groups. 
The story goes that one night J. Golden Kimball, who would later be a senior leader in the church, was meeting with a group of fellow missionaries out in the woods because it wasn't safe for them to assemble together in any of the local towns. Somehow, the KKK found out, parked themselves on the opposite bank of a river, and made a big spectacle of setting up a boiling pot of pitch. 
In response, Kimball bluffed the KKK members, claiming that we all had horns that came out in the moonlight. Anyone who tried it would be gored to death. 
Not only did the KKK members believe him, nearly 200 years later there are people who *still* believe him as well. 

That's about how tall I likely would have been if not for the scoliosis. As it is, I appear to be losing height due to the spinal damage.

Here's a classic: 
 

Toyota, as a company, is officially a Japanese automobile company.
But they have a truck factory here in Texas, one of several factories they have outside of Japan. 
If I was to talk about how Toyota brought jobs to the United States and how certain Toyota vehicles were in fact "all-American", most people would have no idea what I was talking about. If I was to tell them that Toyota Tacoma trucks are perhaps even more common in my part of Texas than anything Ford or Chevy, they'd likely be convinced I was lying. That's because they don't know about the plant down in San Antonio, and likely haven't also factored in the various people employed by the various Toyota dealers across the nation. To them, Toyota is, indeed, a Japanese company because that's where the headquarters facility is and where the company was founded. They wouldn't understand unless I explained it to them, assuming of course they hadn't actually taken offense and decided to ignore me. 
That's the situation we're in. Most people believe things to be just so, and as Orwell warned this includes assigning definitions to words that may not be the definitions that other people use. 
(Seriously. All vehicles made after a certain period are required to indicate where certain parts were made and where final assembly took place. Check your vehicle and the official paperwork.)
edit - 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tacoma#Third_generation_(N300;_2015)
The third generation Tacoma vehicles were assembled in San Antonio as well as two factories in Mexico. It's been confirmed that the fourth generation will be made in Mexico, but no word yet on if production will continue in San Antonio. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tundra
The Tundra, however, is indeed exclusively made in San Antonio. 

OK.
YouTube just changed their terms of service so that ad-blockers are now no longer allowed, this despite the fact that the Chrome browser, which is owned by the same company that owns YouTube, has built-in ad blocking. 
Right now if it detects that you have an ad blocker you're restricted to only three videos at a pop. Not sure if this is daily or three final videos period. 
But for those who were watching church videos (et al) on YouTube, you're either going to have to make a hard choice or going to have to find another outlet. 

In the late 1990s the industry collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. As part of the fall-out, most publishers allowed Diamond Comics a near-monopoly on comic book distribution, and in time Diamond withdrew from most traditional retailers like grocery stores and convenience stores. 
Dollar Tree has its own imprint, Peach Tree Playthings, through which they occasionally publish licensed Disney comics, and last year they printed off a single issue of a tie-in comic for an action figure toy line they've been doing. 
Allegiance Arts briefly made product available through Wal-Mart. 
Alterna was trying to get their product into convenience stores and truck stops. 
That's about it. Even Archie has begun retreating, and they were one of the last publishers to still attempt traditional retail. 
The mainstream industry elite are pushing comic shops and digital sales as the be-all, end-all in response, but I and others have noted that people won't buy what they don't know exists, and digital is corporate self-termination as newcomers don't know about the digital platforms, let alone digital editions. 
This is a big part of why foreign titles and non-traditional titles are dominating now, as their publishers are quite aggressive about ensuring that product is made available at department stores and even some grocery stores. 

Check to see if this is still playing at your local theaters. It debuted last month, but might still be playing. 

KBYU started out life as a PBS station, but in time the college officials (et al) began adding more college-related and church-related content until finally it really didn't resemble a traditional PBS station anymore. That's when the break happened, with KBYU dropping the PBS affiliation, becoming independent, and focusing on its eclectic mix of family, BYU, and religious programming. And since it was independent, it was no longer confined to broadcasting just in Utah, allowing it to broadcast across the United States in a way that KSL-TV couldn't. Thus, it's become a major source for church programming, including Conference.